[Today’s run: none]
In another on-line auction, I recently bid the minimum on a small pile of Trimble Placer GPS 450 vehicle tracking units. And they came via UPS today.
These things are a one board system in a nice aluminum box. Organizations which have vehicles on the road can install these things, one in each vehicle. Then you connect it to a computer terminal or something similar and upload position info to the home office.
Ham radio has a similar thing called APRS. Tracking is not all that APRS does, but it is one popular thing. You get a GPS and a 2-meter ham radio transmitter and a controller. The tracking info goes out over the 2-meter radio on a pre-assigned frequency. People put up digi-peaters (digital repeaters) which hear your tracking info and repeat it so more people can hear it. And I-Gates also put your tracking info on the internet. It works pretty good as long as you are in an area which has good coverage from digi-peaters.
There is a Yahoo Group about how to set up these Trimble units to talk to the popular APRS controller devices. So, with one of these things and a controller/transmitter, a GPS antenna and a 2-meter antenna and you are good to go.
So far I have one of these units talking to my computer over a serial port but I don’t have a GPS antenna that will fit, so it can’t see the satellites. I will get a cheap antenna to try it out. I don’t know if I will do the whole APRS tracking thing. I’ll probably take most of them to the Jackson MS hamfest in January and sell them.
Here’s a picture of the one I opened up:
